I’m not butthurt about anything. I was pointing out that your original comments that “his coach doesn’t trust him with defensive zone starts without one of his stars on the ice” and “his zone starts go up away from his superstars” were both wrong. Perhaps you phrased what you were getting at poorly, but taken as they were said, I was showing that neither is the case. I’m glad we’ve moved on from that to address your real point about his zone starts going up last year in relation to Makar and Fox.
These are Hughes’ zone starts without Miller and Pettersson on the ice last year:
136 offensive zone starts
128 neutral zone starts
105 defensive zone starts
So he had 241 non-neutral zone faceoffs and a 56.4% offensive zone start percentage
Without Miller and Pettersson on the ice for both 21-22 and 22-23 seasons combined, he had a 47.1% offensive zone start percentage.
This means if Hughes had the same offensive zone start percentage without them last year that he had without them the two years prior, he would have had:
114 offensive zone starts
127 defensive zone starts
So we’re talking about 22 extra offensive zone starts.
Essentially, you believe that 1 extra offensive zone start every 4 games significantly impacted Hughes’ possession numbers. This is very hard to believe and why zone starts aren’t considered to have much of an effect overall on possession numbers or production. The link I gave doesn’t “back you up” here. It suggests that while there is a large difference between individual offensive or defensive zone starts, that overall, because the bulk of a players starts are on the fly or in the neutral zone, that the vast majority of players need minimal adjustment in their possession numbers. This is what they say:
So Hughes had a slight advantage here but not enough to suggest the zone starts are even close to the reason for his numbers being so high.
